> I explained that the difference in being sick and being healthy is having to make choices or to consciously think about things when the rest of the world doesn’t have to. The healthy have the luxury of a life without choices, a gift most people take for granted.
What choices do you mean? I'd say that healthy people have more freedom so they have more choices to make. When you come down to it health is about freedom. Freedom from preoccupying pain, constricting impairment, freedom to do whatever. Choices are a symptom of freedom. We must have a different definition somewhere in here. Haven't read the article yet.
Edit: Having read the story, the spoons are a metaphor for units of personal energy required to do a basic everyday task, and the choices, as used in above quote, are compromises you have to make when you have too little spoons to do everything you'd like.
Edit2: man, it's easy to get downvoted in this thread. Do I come off as unsympathetic or something? I've been depressed for most of my life, so spoon-shortage isn't exactly new ground for me.
For what it's worth, I think that while freedom is everyone's ultimate goal, whether they comprehend it or not, it's not necessary for happiness (and not the same as happiness). Happiness is about accepting what is (whatever it might be). Unhappiness is about rejecting what is. To say that happiness depends on what you can do, is to project your internal rejection onto the external "capability", thus retreating to the comfort of not owning your own feelings.
Of course, if someone said "take this pill and you'll be able to do everything" I'd down the whole bottle, but that's because I'd rather circumvent the symptom, than face my own addiction to powerlessness.
Hard choices. The "Should I do X, or it will hurt me?", "Is it worth feeling bad for doing Y?" related to the disease and its impact.
It's not about choice as in a healthy person having a selection of 10 fun sports to decice which to play in a sunny day.
It's about difficult choices, like "I want to do this sport activity today, but should I do it and feel depleted for the rest of my day? I should double think about doing this"
In other words, we could say that healthy people have more options, but sick people (of the variety of the article, not somebody in a come e.g.), have more hard choices on what to do each day, even simple things (e.g. play with the kids).
Or even simpler things that we take for granted, eg brush teeth, get dressed in the morning, or even get out of bed. And no, I don't mean the usual Monday morning tiredness most of us have.
I have small fibre neuropathy in my arms and legs. I don't do the whole "spoons thing", but I do have to make spoon-style choices.
A choice I might make is: will I go out for a short walk with the rest of the family? By doing so, I'll hurt even more, and will need to sleep when I get back - so extra pain for me, and the kids miss out on playing with me later for an hour or two.
I think I agree with part of what you've said. I often think that disability is something imposed by the external world; it is society's expectations of functionality that are encoded into how we've designed our infrastructure and lifestyles. Spoons are in such deficit, largely, because the world is often unadaptable to our capabilities. We change. It remains fixed, expecting that same amount of capability in order to participate. Participation in the world is optional, but to sit alone in spoon-deficit for life is so so awful a concept, especially because it doesn't have to be that way if we only designed more parts of life to accommodate the entire spectrum of capabilities.
I try to tell myself that comments like GP's come from a place of taking one's health for granted, and have only experienced sickness from eating junk food or not sleeping enough.
I have a genetic disorder that makes me fragile, chronically ill, and limits my mobility. I do PT every day for 30-45 minutes - I've never missed a day since September. I eat healthy vegan food and sleep as much as I can (though painsomnia makes this hard.)
I'm doing all the right things, but I'm still sick. If I didn't do the right things, I'd be sicker. I'm still quite limited, and have to carefully plan things that my able-bodied friends take for granted. That's spoon theory.
A lot of people seem to be incapable of thinking in hypotheticals. All they know or care about is whatever they or close family members have experienced directly.
Oh my god, you're right. I'm cured! Thank you so much! No one has ever made this simple connection before and I'll never know how to thank you properly for your contributions.
